Course: Educational Psychology (6402) Semester: Autumn, 2022
Level: ADE/B. Ed (4 Year)
ASSIGNMENT No. 1
Q. 1 Why should a teacher know about Educational Psychology?
Educational Psychology is an important branch of Psychology that focuses on the development of children and adolescents. It studies the factors that affect the growth and development of individuals. Educational psychology helps educators understand what students need to succeed at school and at home. They also help teachers plan lessons and evaluate student progress.
Teachers are experts in the subject matter and know what works best for each student. They also understand the student’s personality and behavior. The teacher helps the students understand concepts and ideas through lectures, discussions, assignments, tests, projects, etc.
Educational Psychology is an important tool for teachers. It helps them understand what students need to succeed in school. It also helps them to teach effectively. Teachers can help students by using teaching methods and strategies according to the behavior and understanding of the students.
How Is Educational Psychology Beneficial?
Educational Psychology is beneficial as they look for the central problem and try to find the solution. It clearly depends on understanding the student’s behavior, knowing about the students, creating a helpful environment for the students, and understanding their needs and capacity to retain information at once.
Q. 2 What is meant by moral development? Discuss Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.
Moral Development focuses on the emergence, change and understanding of morality from infancy through adulthood. Morality develops across a life span in a variety ncknunand is influenced by an individual’s experiences and behavior when faced with moral issues through different periods of physical and cognitive development. Morality concerns an individual’s reforming sense of what is right and wrong; it is for this reason that young children have different moral judgment and character than that of a grown adult. Morality in itself is often a synonym for “rightness” or “goodness.” It also refers to a specific code of conduct that is derived from one’s culture, religion or personal philosophy that guides one’s actions, behaviors and thoughts.
Some of the earliest known moral development theories came from philosophers like Confucius, Aristotle and Rousseau, who took a more humanist perspective and Roma Mia gohthe development of a sense of conscience and virtue. In the modern-day, empirical research has explored morality through a moral psychology lens by theorists like Sigmund Freud and its relation to cognitive development by theorists like Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, B. F. Skinner, Carol Gilligan, and Judith Smetana.
Moral development often emphasizes the culture, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors that contribute to a person’s moral understanding.
Historical background and foundational theories
Freud: Morality and the Superego
Sigmund Freud, a prominent psychologist who is sometimes known as the founder of psychoanalysis, proposed the existence of a tension between the needs of society and the individual. According to Freud, moral development proceeds when the individual’s selfish desires are repressed and replaced by the values of critical socializing agents in one’s life (for instance, one’s parents). In Freud’s terminology, this process is the growth of the ego in balancing the needs and tensions between the id (selfish desires and impulses) and the super-ego (the person’s internal sense of cultural needs and norms as learned from their parents).
Q. 3 Discuss theoretical perspectives about development.
There are five major perspectives that underlie much influential theory and research on child development: “(1) psychoanalytic, which focuses on unconscious emotions and drives; (2) learning, which studies observable behavior; (3) cognitive, which analyzes thought process; (4) contextual, which emphasizes the impact of historical, social, and cultural context; and (5) evolutionary/sociobiological, which considers evolutionary and biological underpinnings of behavior”. From these five major perspectives there are several theories that have been developed. Theories are an explanation based on observation and reasoning. These theories seek to describe, explain, and predict child development. In this paper, I will choose three theories of development to discuss and analyze their key concepts, their similarities, their major points of differences, how their domains of development influence each other, and how understanding development helps those who work with developing children.
Three Theories of Development
The three important theories regarding development I have chosen are Erickson’s psychosocial theory, Freud’s psychosexual theory, and Piaget’s cognitive-stage theory. Erickson believes that a child’s personality develops in stages. He also believed it developed over a life-span, unlike Freud believed it develops in early childhood.
1. Erickson’s theory covers eight stages across the life-span. The eight stages are basic trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus identity confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair.
Q. 4 What do you understand by concept and concept teaching?
Whether you are experienced with or new to inquiry-based teaching, you will regularly hear the word “concept” when planning your lessons and learning engagements. You may already feel comfortable in your knowledge of what a concept is and how to teach so your children gain an understanding of the concept you want them to learn, or you may feel overwhelmed at the prospect of teaching broad concepts instead of specific topics. You may not even know the difference between a concept and topic and may use these words interchangeably. Wherever you are in your teaching and familiarity with concept-based teaching, the information provided in this post will support what you are already doing in your classroom and guide you to become a more confident and competent concept-based teacher.
Concept
Let’s first begin by exploring what a concept actually is and what it is not. Concepts are big, all-encompassing ideas that withstand the test of time and are not constrained to a particular group of people, area or time period and are therefore accessible to every student. According to the IB, “Concepts represent ideas that are broad, abstract, timeless and universal.” They drive an inquiry and help to broaden and deepen your students’ learning.
This description of a concept might resonate with you, or refresh your memory, and you may already have a good idea of what a concept is. If that is not the case, no need to worry, specific, concrete examples of what is and is not a concept will be provided for you.
Q. 5 Discuss classical conditioning as associative theory of learning.
Pavlov Demonstrates Conditioning in Dogs
In the early part of the 20th century, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, was studying the digestive system of dogs when he noticed an interesting behavioural phenomenon: the dogs began to salivate when the lab technicians who normally fed them entered the room, even though the dogs had not yet received any food. Pavlov realized that the dogs were salivating because they knew that they were about to be fed; the dogs had begun to associate the arrival of the technicians with the food that soon followed their appearance in the room.
With his team of researchers, Pavlov began studying this process in more detail. He conducted a series of experiments in which, over a number of trials, dogs were exposed to a sound immediately before receiving food. He systematically controlled the onset of the sound and the timing of the delivery of the food, and recorded the amount of the dogs’ salivation. Initially the dogs salivated only when they saw or smelled the food, but after several pairings of the sound and the food, the dogs began to salivate as soon as they heard the sound. The animals had learned to associate the sound with the food that followed.